Website Downtime: Why Online Sellers Should Never Put All of Their Eggs in One Basket

If you sell online via websites like eBay, you may not understand how you can prevent website downtime from taking a toll on your business’s profits. After all, it isn’t as if you can do anything to prevent a site like eBay from going down, or take action to get it back up and running if it does, but you still need to know when a site outage occurs on a sales platform you do business on. Before you think you are at the mercy of the company you sell your products on, keep these things in mind.

Never Put All of Your Eggs in One Basket

It used to be that eBay was the only place for some sellers to offer the goods they have for sale. This isn’t even close to being true anymore. If you sell items on eBay, then you should also be selling those items on Amazon and even your own storefront in order to drive sales if downtime occurs on one of your selling platforms. For example, if eBay goes down for a few hours, you can contact your customers via social media letting them know your products are still accessible via Amazon or your own online web store. Handling your ecommerce business this way will ensure that if one site goes down, your entire business (and its profits) don’t go down with it.

Monitor the Sites You Do Business On

While you may not be able to do anything about downtime that occurs on a site that is not your own, if you use that site as a part of your business sales strategy, you need to know if it goes down so you can redirect your sales. If a site that you sell on goes down and you are notified about it when it happens, you can adjust your marketing efforts to target the sites your customers can still access. This may mean adjusting your inventory on your other selling platforms to meet increased demand and redirected sales and using social media to let customers know exactly where to go to get your products during the downtime event.

You Can’t Always Control Downtime

While you can’t always control downtime, you can prepare for it and minimize how it affects your business’s profitability. For online sellers who use platforms like eBay to sell their products, it’s not as easy as putting website monitoring in place and changing hosting providers when problems arise. For these online businesses, it’s a matter of spreading your inventory across multiple selling platforms so if one website goes down, your business can continue to sell and profit via the other platforms you sell on.